What Were the Long-Term Effects of the Gnadenhutten Massacre?

This is the fifth in a series of five posts. If you haven't already read the post in which the Gnadenhutten Massacre of 1782 is described, please read it here.

 

When the Pennsylvania militia managed to kill ninety-six innocent Indians, only two boys were lucky to survive. But, like any village, the Indians at Gnadenhutten had family and friends that lived in other communities and this post is about how the massacre affected those other survivors.

[caption id="attachment_1288" align="alignleft" width="225"] Clinton A. Weslager (1909-1994) wrote several books about the Delaware Indians. In this photo he is [obviously] thinking about something very different from the Gnadenhutten Massacre.[/caption]

In addition to the normal emotional process of mourning that friends and family go through, the Gnadenhutten Massacre had a strong effect on the thinking or the mindset of Delaware Indians from other villages. On page 35 of my book, Proud and Determined, I quote historian Clinton A. Weslager who wrote

The belief was widely held that the Moravian missionaries at Gnadenhutten made the Indians "tame" in order to soften them for destruction and, after taming them, summoned the American soldiers to kill them.

Roughly twenty years later, this belief or mindset was still evident when the Moravians tried to get another mission going.

Weslager continues:

When the Moravian mission was established on [Indiana's] White River, news went from one Delaware village to another that these missionaries were also under orders from the United States government to tame the Delawares and that those foolish enough to accept Christianity would soon be "knocked in the head."

For that (and other reasons) it really shouldn't surprise us that the Moravians' White River mission never succeeded.

Source: Weslager, Clinton A. The Delaware Indians: A History, New Brunswick , New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1972, page 342.

Read more about Clinton Weslager and his books at John P. Reid's Collecting Delaware Books site.
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Why Weren't the Perpetrators of the Gnadenhutten Massacre Brought to Justice?

If you've been following this series of posts, you already know that the Gnadenhutten Massacre was a horrible and shameful example of frontier violence during the American Revolution (which also makes it part of the Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes). The massacre itself was described in the post just prior to this one.

Those of you who have read my book, Proud and Determined, know that The Stockbridge Mohicans were briefly suspected of arson, kidnapping and murder by their white neighbors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Those suspicions were short-lived, because of the larger picture: a state of war between the British and the French with the Stockbridge Indians ready to fight for the British. (Those acts of arson, kidnapping, and murder, committed by French-allied Indians, were what brought the French and Indian War to Stockbridge, Massachusetts.)

The Moravian Indians in the Ohio River Valley, however, were in a much different situation. They were associating themselves with German-speaking missionaries. The Moravian missionaries - aside perhaps, from the fact that they were white - really had no standing in American society (and no standing in British society either). The Moravian committment to peace and justice meant on the one hand that the mission communities themselves weren't going to exploit their Native converts. But on the other hand, the Moravian Indians were - in a lot of ways - a lot more vulnerable to outside forces compared with Indians like the Stockbridges who had managed to align themselves with the white American powers-that-be.

The Moravian committment to peace is something that their white farmer neighbors simply didn't understand. In their view - according to Leonard Sadosky (201) - it was impossible for Indians to be neutral in war.

And you probably remember from my last post that that was part of the context in which the Gnadenhutten Massacre occurred.

You'll also remember from earlier posts that Sadosky divides frontier society into three groups: The largest group was made up of common white farmers and the Pennsylvania militia that were guilty of killing ninety-six Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten came from this largest group.

But the smallest group in number, the gentry, or upper class whites, held positions of power and they were the ones who should have brought the perpetrators to justice. Why didn't that happen?

Sadosky's chapter ("Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre") in the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, has been very difficult for me to "get my head around" and I think I know why. His topic is an event of great cruelty and racism - but he manages to go beyond the cruelty and racism of the Gnadenhutten Massacre to see more.

According to Sadosky (page 202), "Indian trade, alliance, and coexistence...formed the centerpiece of the Continental commanders' [frontier] strategy" at Fort Pitt. And this rubbed the common white farmers the wrong way. Going back as far as 1779, Sadosky analyses Colonel Daniel Brodhead's roughly two years as commander of Fort Pitt, which ended with the common farmers pressuring General George Washington to relinquish his position.  By the end of 1781, Brigadier General William Irvine was the new commandant at Fort Pitt. When Irvine left to consult with Congress, "the rumble of mutiny and rebellion was heard from inside the walls of Fort Pitt"(197). The enlisted men (the common white farmers) were rebelling against the upper class white officer corps.

When General Irvine returned, he struggled to get everybody onto the same page. His approach to - or avoidance of - the Gnadenhutten Massacre is explained by Sadosky:

Irvine was determined to not become a victim of political pratfalls that had handicapped, and in some cases almost killed, his predecessors. Fortunately for the historian, on several occassions Irvine revealed his inner thoughts... Just weeks after he returned...and learned of the violence...he observed that "The general and common opinion of the people of this country is that all Continental officers are too fond of Indians"(204).

General Irvine wanted to keep his job - and save his skin. That serves as enough of an explanation as to why he kept quiet about the massacre.

In Sadosky's last paragraph he writes that an

adversarial and hierarchichal social structure combined with a potent public policy debate [produced] a combustible situation. Commandants Daniel Brodhead and William Irvine were patrician, autocratic outsiders in a world that valued independence, liberty, and patriarchal authority. Given the anti-aristocratic nature of the American Revolution, the commandants found themselves in a position that offered enormous potential to offend the local populace. The militiamen of Washington County wanted a change in how the Continental commanders made use of the enormous public powers granted them. Violence against the Continental army's Native wards, and threats against its officers were a brutal, but effective way to achieve these ends. Daniel Brodhead's inability to heed the signs of popular discontent resulted in his removal from office and set into motion a series of events culminating in massacre and rebellion.

I've been struggling with Sadosky's nineteen-page chapter for a few weeks now and I'm glad to be done with it. For almost the entire time, I was not able to get past the brutality and racism of the massacre itself to understand what Sadosky was able to add to it with his broader analysis. But that is what sets his work apart from the others.

The final post in this series will be about at least one long-term effect of the shameful day in Gnadenhutten.

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Leonard Sadosky Recounts the Gnadenhutten Massacre

[caption id="attachment_953" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] This is an artist's conception of the Gnadenhutten Massacre. The white militiamen did use hatchets to scalp their victims. However, the killing itself is believed to have been done with a cooper's mallet.[/caption]

My previous post ended with a "To be Continued..."

We were at the point where David Williamson again brought together a militia of white farmers. The horrible massacre itself was still a few weeks away.

I imagine there is no substitute for actually reading Leonard Sadosky's chapter: "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre: The Contest for Power in the Public World of the Revolutionary Pennsylvania Frontier." (It is found in the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814.) Consider this a first look at Sadosky's work.

Again - my disclaimer - the Gnadenhutten Massacre still was what it was. It cannot be explained away. It was certainly what we now would call a crime of war. [Sadosky appropriately cited the sources he used with endnotes which I have not reproduced here.]

 

As you may remember from my previous post, many of the Moravian Indians - and the two missionaries, Zeisberger and Heckewelder - had been taken away from their villages by British-allied Indians in the fall of 1781. Most of them were allowed to return to gather corn in February, 1782. While they were busy in the fields, the Indians of Gnadenhutten were warned by a party of warriors "that they would probably be pursued"(198). Sadosky adds

Some villagers were worried, but the majority reasoned that since the Americans knew they were Christians, and since they needed to finish gathering their corn, they would return to Sandusky only when the enitre harvest was gathered. It was a fatal miscalculation.

Then he goes on to describe the events of that shameful day, March 7, 1782. As Williamson's roughly two-hundred men came near Gnadenhutten, they came upon a young Delaware man and immediately one of the Pennsylvania rifles fired, injuring the man in the arm and knocking him to the ground. Sadosky continues

As the militia came upon him he begged for his life, saying he was Joseph Shebosh, the son of a white Moravian missionary. Another gunshot echoed through the frozen woodland, and Shebosh was dead (198).

And then he was scalped.

The militia rode on into the town where they managed to appear non-threatening to the peaceful Indians, warned them of possible danger, talked about taking them to Fort Pitt for their own safety and then they had the Indians hand over whatever weapons they had.

According to Sadosky, the white farmers' militia found it "odd" that the

Delawares were using axes, pewter bowls, pewter spoons, teakettles, and cups. They observed also that their horses were branded and that other articles were stamped with letters. Surely, they reasoned, these goods were evidence that these Indians had engaged in the plunder of Washington County (PA), or at least were friendly with those who had. Williamson and his men accused the Delawares of theft and murder (199).

Accusers often jump to conclusions when making allegations.

According to Sadosky, "Accounts vary as to what transpired next." But - although the particulars vary from one source to another - together all the sources "present a fairly coherent picture of Gnadenhutten's final day," which included "violent actions that were as cold and calculated as they were brutal"(199).

Wiliamson convened a war council in which about two dozen militiamen advocated the sparing of the Indians' lives. But the majority ruled. The militia informed the men, women and children of Gnadenhutten that they were going to be put to death. The Indians first protested and then resigned themselves to their fate. On page 200, Sadosky quotes Heckewelder who was still being kept prisoner at Sandusky (Heckewelder's own source will be revealed later in this post).

They kneeled down, offering fervent prayers to God their Savior - and kissing one another, under a flood of tears, fully resigned to his will, they sang praises unto him, in joyful hope, that they would soon be relieved from all pains, and join their redeemer in everlasting bliss.

The next paragraph is Sadosky's description of the massacre itself:

Those militiamen who did not wish to participate in the killing left the village. But plenty of Pennsylvanians and Virginians remained to enact the sentance of death. Still singing, still crying, the male Moravians were separated from the women and children, and led to two separate houses. Then, one militiaman seized the mallet of Gnadenhutten's cooper from one of the houses and began striking the men on the head with it one by one. After the first man had killed fourteen, he called for another to take his place. All the Indians were struck, then scalped. Finally the militiamen set the houses afire. Amazingly, two young boys managed to survive the slaughter - one by hiding silently in a cellar, the other by feigning death amidst the pile of corpses in one of the "slaughter-houses." They both escaped, made their way to Sandusky, and their testimony became the basis for the accounts of Moravian historians George Loskiel and John Heckewelder (200).

 

This series on the Gnadenhutten Massacre will continue.
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Gnadenhutten and Fort Pitt on the Frontier of the American Revolution

[caption id="attachment_935" align="aligncenter" width="300"] "Gnadenhutten" is German for "Huts of Grace."[/caption]

A lot of people won't be able to get past the fact that ninety-six Christian Indians - including women and children - were killed at Gnadenhutten Ohio. I myself didn't want to write another post about it. What good can come out of it, I was thinking. And what point is there to give the massacre context. It still was what it was, right?

If you remember one thing about Gnadenhutten, it should, of course, be the massacre itself and it goes without saying that it was a shameful, horrible atrocity.

The concepts of "crimes against humanity" and crimes of war" had not been conceived yet back in 1782. But they describe what happened at Gnadenhutten, Ohio.

While the context surrounding the Gnadenhutten Massacre will not explain it away, it would be too easy for me to just tell myself that with all the emotion surrounding the Gnadenhutten Massacre, I should just call it a war crime and then move on to another topic. No. My subject in Algonkian Church History is Christian Indians and if I'm going to give Gnadenhutten its fair weight, then I need to go into a lot more detail.

So here goes. Here are some relevant facts or context, or whatever:

According to historian Leonard Sadosky, the goings-on at Fort Pitt are an important element in knowing more about the Gnadenhutten Massacre. In his chapter "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre," Sadosky goes into a lot of detail about Gnadenhutten's context.

Sadosky tells us that Fort Pitt was run by white American oligarchs, or the upper-class. At that time, white America could be divided into the upper class (or gentry) and the common farmers. Furthermore, Sadosky notes, one of the themes of the American Revolution itself was of the common white man trying to liberate himself from the upper class. On the frontier back then (as Sadosky tells it), there were a lot of common whites, less Indians, and the smallest group of all were the white oligarchs, the gentry, or upper class. The upper class whites understood the need for diplomacy with the Indians. But the farmers had their own needs and didn't place much value on the importance of getting along with the Indians. The militia responsible for the Gnadenhutten massacre was made up of lower class white farmers.

Let's try to follow Sadosky's line of thought:

He says there was a "popular antipathy toward commerce and diplomacy with Indians [that] became manifest at several points during the years leading up to the Gnadenhutten Massacre"(193).

Sadosky understands the significance of Gnadenhutten being on the frontier during wartime:

War for American Independence placed the Moravian villages in a precarious poisition. they found themselves almost directly between the Anglo-American faming communities of western Pennsylvania, and the numerous British-allied Native villages of the Great Lakes Basin. Caught in the middle of this geopolitical vortex, the Moravian Delawares attempted to placate both sides in order to maintain their neutrality (196-197).

And how did the Moravian villages placate both sides"? According to Sadosky

The Moravian towns often provided a way station for British-allied Indians raiding the Pennsylvania farms, while Moravian leaders, such as the Reverend John Heckewelder and the Reverend David Zeisberger, provided intelligence to the Continental commanders at Fort Pitt (197).

Next comes some action:

British-allied Indians had taken the Moravian missionaries and many of the Indians as prisoners in 1781.

White farmer David Williamson gathered up a militia and toured the Moravian villages, in November, 1781, but, of course few people were around, because they were being help by the British-allied Indians.

Williamson's militia captured the few Indians they found and took them to Fort Pitt.

As soon as the commandant at Fort Pitt learned they were from the Christian communities, he released the prisoners that Williamson's militia had rounded up.

Per Sadosky (197), "The fact that the Indians' release was soon followed by attacks against farms on the western edge of Washington County raised the ire of many of the County's residents."

By early February of 1782, the enlisted men at Fort Pitt were threatening mutiny, stemming from a "lack of pay and no provision for clothing"(197). And

At nearly the same time, a raiding party from Sandusky, probably of Wyandots and Mingoes, entered the western townships of Washington County. They attacked and raided several blockhouses, killing some Pennsylvanians and taking others prisoner. Ostensibly desiring to recover the prisoners, the men of Washington County mustered into a militia unit in the latter part of February in order to pursue the Indians (198).

 

To be continued.....

 

Sadosky's chapter is part of the book The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814

Citation:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

 
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The Gnadenhutten Massacre: Introduction

This monument in Gnadenhutten, Ohio honors the 96 massacre victims.

 

I don't know if I can put enough weight on how sad, how shameful, or how unjust the Gnadenhutten Massacre was. But maybe just a description of the uncontested facts will be enough to make you upset - no matter if you are an Indian or non-Indian, Christian or something else. I'm going to quote the description of the Gnadenhutten Massacre from Proud and Determined:

The Stockbridges were keenly aware that a whole village of Christian Indians had already been claimed by frontier violence. The Moravian mission town of Gnadenhutten in what is now Ohio had fallen prey to a raiding party of 160 Pennsylvania militiamen under Colonel David Williamson in March of 1782. The peaceful Indians...were faithful to the end; even after being told they would die the next day, they spent their last night praying and singing hymns. A total of 96 innocent Indians, including men, women and 39 children were murdered by blows to the head with a [cooper's] mallet and scalped by the militia. No attempt was made to bring them to justice.

 

*  *  *

 
I used the following sources at the time:

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 390.

Olmstead, Earl P. Blackcoats Among the Delaware: David Zeisberger on the Ohio Frontier. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991, 330-335.

Slaughter, Thomas P. The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, 75-78.

 

But since I wrote Proud and Determined, I've become aware of another more current source. Leonard Sadosky wrote a book chapter called "Rethinking the Gnadenhutten Massacre."  For the sake of clarity, I'll repeat myself here: ninety-six innocent Indians were massacred. Nobody, including Sadosky, questions that. And maybe that is all that matters to you.

I haven't read all of Sadosky's chapter yet, but early on he gives us a clear tipoff of what it is about:

The massacre has figured prominently in several recent histories of the Revolutionary frontier and Indian-white relations, but it has yet to be put in its appropriate context. Thomas Slaughter describes the massacre as a product of "frustration" on the part of the western Pennsylvanians, and it was but one of many events that prefigured the Whiskey Rebellion that was to follow. For Richard White, the massacre was prime evidence of an omnipresent, almost pathological feeling of "Indian-hatred" that permeated the society of the American frontier. Although the descriptions of the Gnadenhutten Massacre offered by these and other historians are generally accurate, their explanations of the massacre are unsatisfactory.

 

I haven't read much beyond that point myself. But I'm inclined to suspect that it will be fodder for at least one more post, if not several.

By the way, Sadosky's chapter starts on page 187 of the following book:

Skaggs, David Curtis, and Larry L. Nelson. The Sixty Years' War for the Great
Lakes, 1754-1814. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001.

 

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From Stockbridge, Massachusetts to...not only New Stockbridge, New York

Pictured above: The Berkshire mountains (hills) of western Massachusetts.

The Munsee Indians by Robert Grumet covers a people who had - to a large extent - intermarried with other tribes by the end of the Revolutionary War. It seems the Munsees were most likely to mix-in with Mohicans (Mahicans) and other scattered Algonquian-speaking people. So I was not surprised that Gromet appears to do as good a job of anybody in following the Stockbridge Mohicans from their town in Massachusetts to their next home, which, he points out, wasn't New Stockbridge, New York for everybody.

Some Stockbridgers also moved north to the Abenaki town of St. Francis Odanak. A few trekked west to join with the Delaware Indian main body in Ohio. Family traditions also affirm that a small number of families refusing to leave settled in remote hollows in the mountainous country about Stockbridge [Mass.] (page 279).

It shouldn't really surprise us that the make-up of a tribe would change somewhat with each migration. To some extent, it also explains how the "people of many trails" came to be made up of many tribes.

I was surprised that Grumet doesn't cover the Gnadenhutten Massacre. I'm saving that shameful event in American history for a later post, but I hoped that Grumet would at least mention it and weigh in on the somewhat controversial issue of whether the victims at Gnadenhutten were Delawares or Mohicans. Nevertheless, the tone of the whole book suggests that by 1782, the Munsee Delawares were so inter-married with other tribes that it might be pointless for him to argue whether they were Mohicans or Delawares: they must have been both.

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One More Time: The Munsee Indians in Wisconsin[?]

This map is from the official site of the Delaware Tribe of Indians.

As discussed earlier, the people that I call the Stockbridge Mohicans have a number of other names. Their 1939 constitution gave them the handle "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community."

For a while I was telling my white friends that I was researching the history of the "Stockbridge-Munsee Indians." As a result, they completely missed the point that the tribe identifies mostly with being Mohican. You can be both Mohican and something else, but if you're talking to somebody, does that person (or persons) give you enough time to say "Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians? The answer is no. So you shorten the name, and "Stockbridge Mohicans" works for me.

In my research I've come across a lot of sources that say things about "the Munsees" and certainly there were still groups of Munsees that stayed together after the Lenape or Delaware Indians had been pushed out of their homeland. One of the Munsee groups that stuck together became guests of the Stockbridge Mohicans (from 1837 to 1839) at Stockbridge, Wisconsin. But many of the Munsees didn't stick together. Many generations ago, a large portion of the  Munsees had already begun to disperse across the face of Turtle Island, often marrying into other tribes.

I won't make the claim that no Munsees joined the Stockbridge Mohicans in the 1800's, of course some did. Big Deer is one. John Killsnake is another. And the Mohawk family, they were Munsees and my guess is they took on the name "Mohawk" because they had been living among Mohawks in New York before coming to Wisconsin.

But if the word "Munsee" deserves to be in the tribe's name at all - and I questioned that in Proud and Determined - it is for two reasons, 1) the Munsees and the Mohicans intermarried a lot starting at about 1670, and 2) about two hundred Wappinger Munsees moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts during the French and Indian War. But the Mohicans didn't change the name then. The "Munsee" part of the tribe's name was added by the United States federal government in the next century - that is something for another blogpost entirely.

Anyway, Robert Grumet's The Munsee Indians gives us a lot of insight into the consequences of the Munsees being mixed-in with various other tribes.

The need to choose one's nationality after marriage made things even more difficult for Munsees living in multicultural communities after 1767.... Decisions to adopt spouse's nationalities played major roles in turning many Munsee family names into surnames later primarily found in other Indian communities. The Munsee Nimham family name, for example, gradually became the prominent Oneida Ninham surname after Munsee Nimham men loosened from the ties of their matrilineages adopted the nationalities of their Oneida wives (pages 274-275).

Probably another family that is in a similar situation is the Metoxens. Maybe you know some other examples?

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Disambiguation of Lenape/Delaware/Mahican/River Indians

On page twelve of The Munsee Indians, A History, Robert Grumet states

The idea that cultures are...organizations of [internal] diversity is important... People identified as Munsees in one context and Mahicans [his spelling] in another did not suddenly become members of different cultures. Neither did references to people by different names necessarily suggest confusion or disorganization. Names used like this can reflect what may be called situational identity. Different names identifying the same people in different situations serve as markers of social flexibility that can allow a person to function as a Munsee in one context and a Mahican in another.

There was always cultural change, but that change accelerated after white contact. Grumet says that the fact that the Munsees were "enduring people" means that all the specifics of their lives changed. And with that change, it sometimes becomes harder to keep track of who is who. While Gromet says all the different names doesn't necessarily suggest confusion, I think that there is a lot of confusion about different names - I know for a fact that they aren't used with consistency.

The Arvid E. Miller Museum had a sign (maybe they still do) that listed many names and claimed they were all different names for the same tribe. I'd qualify that by saying that they were all legitimate names for the people now known - according to their most recent constitution - as "The Stockbridge-Munsee Community." That is not quite the same as saying all the names on the sign referred to exactly the same people in exactly the same context.

One of the names on the sign was "River Indians." According to Patrick Frazier, the River Indians included "the Mohicans and the Indians at Schaghticoke"(see page 6 of The Mohicans of Stockbridge).

Let's try another one. This is according to Grumet: "Today, many writers regard Lenape as the most appropriate term to use when talking about Delaware-speaking people." But he adds that "Lenape" is too broad of a term to be used in everyday language by the people themselves.

Wikipedia has pages where they "disambiguate" names that refer to more than one thing. Although I've made some attempt to disambugate the eastern Algonquian Indians here in this post, at some point, this disambugation becomes a fool's errand. We have to accept that the rapid change over the first 100 or 200 years of white contact resulted in complexity which, in turn, resulted in some confusion over names.

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